What Congress gets wrong about the Arctic Refuge and America’s sportsmen

For sportsmen and women, there is a specific kind of gratitude that percolates from within when we search for and eventually encounter large landscapes that lack the prominent features or segmentation of development.

From Eastern Montana’s rolling rangeland, where antelope and mule deer reign supreme, to the Gila Backcountry in New Mexico, where Gila Trout feed the drift in high-mountain creeks, public lands are the lifeblood of those of us who live for the violent eat of a bull trout or the thrill of spot and stalk.

They are our collective inheritance meant to pass from generation to generation. But today, that lifeblood is thinning thanks to our leaders putting private interests ahead of the American people. On June 5, a lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge began to offer up public land in one of the wildest last best places, the coastal plain, for oil and gas drilling — a decision we both oppose.

The refuge stretches across 19.6 million acres of public land, an area approximately the size of South Carolina. It is home to some of the most extraordinary concentrations of wildlife in North America: caribou, musk ox, Dall sheep, wolves, grizzly and polar bears and more than 200 species of migratory birds that come from all 50 states.

We are among a fraction of adventurous Americans who have had the privilege to traverse this unique American landscape. The refuge is the crown jewel of the American public lands system — a place that every backcountry hunter and angler dreams of experiencing firsthand, and rightfully so. We are the only........

© The Hill